Afghan War: Blowback in action

This article from USA Today has a couple of good observations on the way that earlier US and Pakistani policies in earlier years is producing unwelcome "blowback," which is another word for unintended consequences in the situation in Afghanistan today: Fundamentalism encouraged in tribes (03/23/04). The article concerns the current US-British-Pakistani offensive against al-Qaeda and the Taliban on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, including the "tribal areas" in Pakistan:

A decades-long official strategy of benign neglect has molded the semiautonomous tribal areas into hospitable terrain for Islamic militants. Starved of education and employment opportunities, people on the harsh border with Afghanistan have embraced fundamentalist theology and all who uphold it. ...

In the 1990s, when the Pakistani government supported the radical Islamic Taliban's drive for power in neighboring Afghanistan, Islamabad encouraged the locals' leaning toward fundamental Islam and the Taliban. "These ideas have been put into the minds of the tribesmen by the Pakistani establishment," sys Abdul Latif Afridi, a politically active lawyer from one of the tribal areas.

U.S. policies, too, contributed to the current situation. During the 1980s, Washington supported fundamentalist mujahedin when they fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After that war, as U.S. interest in the region waned and Afghanistan was consumed by internal  strife, Muslim fighters fled to Pakistan's tribal areas. "These people have children there. They have married there with local women. That's why they are considered locals and not terrorists," said Qari Mohammed Fayyaz Alvi, a member of the religiously based Jamaat-e-Islami party.

It's worth remembering that when the US was funding, arming and otherwise encouraging the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan against the Soviets, the American press and politicians of both parties here cheerfully regarded them as "freedom fighters." But that was where the particular brand of poisonous extremism that we identify today with al-Qaeda was being bred and nurtured.